Einstein believed in God - so do many other scientists
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Re: “Science is open-minded on the existence of God”, Letters, October 5.
For evidence that most religious people are open-minded about science, readers can google the Slate article “Highly religious people see little conflict with science”, which has a link to the Pew Research survey on the subject.
On that same subject, many years ago Nature magazine interviewed members of the US National Academy of Sciences and found that 93 per cent of them were atheists. Half the people they asked didn’t respond, however, and members of that academy do not necessarily represent scientists as a whole.
Elaine Ecklund’s book, “Science vs Religion: What Scientists Really Think”, presents a different picture. She surveyed over 1,600 scientists at research universities and found that the ratio of atheists to believers was about the same.
Ecklund comments: “Much of what we believe about the faith lives of elite scientists is wrong. The ‘insurmountable hostility’ between science and religion is a caricature, a thought-cliche, perhaps useful as a satire on groupthink, but hardly representative of reality.”
Stan G
